Amazon at 20: A look back at its best and worst moments

Amazon 1995

1995: At first glance, Amazon looked like just another early website.

Published: July 7, 2015 -- 16:22 GMT (09:22 PDT)

Caption by: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Jeff Bezos on top of the world

1995: On July 5, 1995 Jeff Bezos
founded Amazon, It wasn't a moment of revelation. It came from cold,
hard calculations while he was a VP at D.E.
Shaw, an investment company.
Bezos said, "The
wake up call was finding this startling statistic that web usage in
the spring of 1994 was growing
at 2,300 percent a year. You know, things just don’t grow that
fast. It’s highly unusual, and that started me about thinking, 'What kind of business plan might make sense in the context of that
growth?'"

Published: July 7, 2015 -- 16:22 GMT (09:22 PDT)

Caption by: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

The Amazon Garage

1995: The answer, of course was
an online book store. Bezos moved to Bellevue Washington and started
Amazon
in his garage. The company soon moved into a small house and then, after
beta testing with 300 friends, Amazon opened its virtual doors on
July 16, 1995.

Published: July 7, 2015 -- 16:22 GMT (09:22 PDT)

Caption by: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Amazon's IPO became arguably the most successful ever

1997: Amazon took off like a
sky-rocket. In two months, its sales hit $20-thousand a week. Not two
years later, on May 15, 1997, Amazon's
initial public offering jumped by 30 percent on its first day of
trading. A $1,000 investment in Amazon that day was worth over
$239-thousand in 2013, and even more today.

Published: July 7, 2015 -- 16:22 GMT (09:22 PDT)

Caption by: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Alexa purchase leads to Echo

1999: Amazon buys Alexa, a
web-traffic analysis company for $250-million. 16-years later, Amazon
finally figured out a way to make it profitable: Use its cloud-based
analytic software to power Amazon
Echo, a voice-activated home assistant and entertainment center.

Amazon Marketplace

2000: In that same month, Amazon
launched Amazon Marketplace. With this service third-party retailers
can sell merchandise side-by-side with Amazon. Since 2000, Amazon has
expanded it to Amazon
Business for business-to-business retailers and Amazon
Home Services for home services such as plumbing and
home-cleaning.

Published: July 7, 2015 -- 16:22 GMT (09:22 PDT)

Caption by: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Amazon weathers the dot com crash

2001: In the dot com crash's darkest
days, Amazon's stock fell to less than $6 a share. Unlike companies
such as Pets.com, Kozmo.com, and Webvan, Amazon survived by focusing,
as Bezos has always done, on long-term goals over profit and
customers.

Amazon Kindle

2007: Kindle. There were earlier
ebook readers, such as 1998's Rocket
eBook and the SoftBook Reader, but the Kindle is what transformed
ebooks from a novelty to the replacement for printed books.

Published: July 7, 2015 -- 16:22 GMT (09:22 PDT)

Caption by: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Amazon's 1984 blunder

2009: Amazon worst moment in
ebook publishing was when the company deleted copies of—all the
irony—George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm from hundreds of
thousands of Kindles because of a copyright problem. Amazon
eventually made it right with customers, but the warning that we only
"rent" books from Amazon and the evils
of Digital Rights Management (DRM) had become clear.

Published: July 7, 2015 -- 16:22 GMT (09:22 PDT)

Caption by: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Amazon Video

2011: Netflix is easily the most
popular Internet video streaming system, but Amazon Instant Video is
making a contest of it. By combining free movies and TV shows with Amazon Prime, Amazon has ensured its video offerings will always have an audience.

Fire Phone

2014: Just because the Kindle
proved a great success doesn't mean that Amazon can do no wrong with
hardware. One need look no further than the Fire
Phone. Bad hardware and poor pricing led to Amazon's smartphone
being a complete flop.

Published: July 7, 2015 -- 16:22 GMT (09:22 PDT)

Caption by: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Amazon vs. Hachette

2014: As Amazon grew into the
800-pound gorilla of ebook publishing, it was inevitable that it
would fight with traditional publishers. In the biggest of these
battles to date, for a time Amazon made it hard to buy books from
Hachette. In the end, Hachette
won the battle over ebook pricing, but the war isn't over yet.

Published: July 7, 2015 -- 16:22 GMT (09:22 PDT)

Caption by: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Amazon and its owners

1995 to 2015: Almost from day one,
stockholders have complained about how Bezos has also focused on
growth over revenue. Still, since on July 6th, the first day the
stock market was open after Amazon's 20th birthday, Amazon's stock
price was over $436 a share. Clearly, most Amazon stockholders are
just fine with Bezos at the company's helm.